A Different Blue(39)

fool. She was discredited and taken out, and Henry let it happen.”

“He obviously wasn't hungry anymore,” I added caustically.

Wilson's ears turned pink, which pleased me deeply.

“Obviously,” he added dryly, his voice betraying none of his discomfort. “Which brings us

back to our original thought. Things are rarely what they seem. What is the truth beneath the

surface, beneath the apparent facts? Think now about your own life . . .”

I tuned Wilson out and laid my forehead down on my desk, letting my hair hide my face. I knew

where this was going. Our personal histories. Why was he doing this? What was the point? I

stayed that way, my head against my desk as Wilson finished his lecture and the sounds of papers

being passed and pencils being sharpened replaced his buttery British accent.

“Blue?”

I didn't move.

“Are you ill?”

“No,” I grumbled, sitting up and shoving my hair from my face. I glowered up at him as I took

the paper that he held out to me. He acted as if he wanted to speak, thought better of it, and

retreated to his desk. I watched him go, wishing I dared tell him I wouldn't do the assignment.

I couldn't do it. My sad little paragraph looked like chicken scratch on the wrinkled page.

Chicken scratch. That's what I was. A chicken, pecking at nothing, squawking and ruffling my

feathers to make myself appear strong, to keep people at a distance.



“Once upon a time there was a little blackbird, pushed from the nest, unwanted. Discarded. Then

a Hawk found her and swooped her up and carried her away, giving her a home in his nest,

teaching her to fly. But one day the Hawk didn't come home, and the little bird was alone again,

unwanted. She wanted to fly away. But as she rose to the edge of the nest and looked out across

the sky, she noticed how small her wings were, how weak. She was trapped. She could fly away,

but where would she go?”



[page]I added the new lines to my story and stopped, tapping my pencil against the page, like

tiny seeds for the chicken to peck. Maybe that was the truth beneath the surface. I was scared.

I was terrified that my story would end tragically. Like poor Anne Boleyn. She plotted and

planned and became Queen, only to be discarded. There was that word again. The life she had

built was taken from her in one fell swoop, and the man who should have loved her abandoned her

to fate.

I had never considered myself a chicken. In my dreams I was the swan, the bird that became

beautiful and admired. The bird that proved everyone wrong. I asked Jimmy once why he was named

after a bird. Jimmy was used to my questions. He told me I had been abnormally resilient and

mostly unaffected by the absence of my mother. I hadn't cried or complained, and I was very

talkative, almost to the point of driving a man who had lived with little company and even less

conversation a little crazy. He never lost his temper with me, although sometimes he just

refused to answer, and I ended up prattling to myself.

But this particular time he was in the mood for storytelling. He explained how hawks are

symbolic of protection and strength, and that because of that he had always been proud of his

name. He told me many of the Native American tribes had variations of some of the same stories

about animals, but his favorite was an Arapaho story about a girl who climbed into the sky.